Real Steel: Interview with Dakota Goyo and swag bag-giveaway!

We saw Real Steel and it’s much better than its premise.  That sounds like a slam, but when your premise is robot boxing that’s guided by a father/son relationship, you’re not expecting too much.  The movie is really entertaining, packed with action and uses CGI very efficiently.

The folks at DreamWorks offered us two opportunities:  an interview with Dakota Goyo, who plays Max in the movie and a Real Steel giveaway swag bag.  We took them up on both of them and here are the results.

Dakota Goyo is the young actor that portrays Max in Real Steel.  He’s 11 years old and wise beyond his years.  When you watch Real Steel you realize that even though his character is a plot device in a simple movie, the actor portraying him is making it something more.

During the interview Dakota was respectful of everyone, yet still a typical 11 year old.  Granted he’s an extremely patient 11 year old, with a larger than average vocabulary.  Goyo has been acting since he was 5 years old, doing animated voiceovers and has a real knack for remembering lines.

In Real Steel, Goyo’s favorite scene was when he finally gets to wash ‘Atom’, the boxing robot that he and his dad found in the garbage.  That scene has a very ‘Rockyesque’ feel to it and sets up the second half of the movie’s action.  “Working with 9-foot tall functioning robots is a kid’s dream”, Goyo said about his work on Real Steel.

Filming the movie required 9.5 hours a day for 72 days.  When Dakota said that I tried to remember back to when I was 11 years old and how an hour of tennis practice caused me to whine and complain.  For a youth to have that dedication, and do a good job- is enviable and demonstrates that he’s really got something unique.

If there’s a tick in the storyline of Real Steel, it’s that it continues the ‘bad dad’ stereotype.  It’s the dad who disappears for a couple of years only to discover that his son can fight robots/produce a vaccine to save mankind or pilot the plane.  For the most part, action movies use children as plot tools and not real characters.  However, Real Steel is so entertaining that these stereotypes were momentarily forgotten through a robot boxing haze.

Max isn’t a character tool.  Granted the movie is simple fun, but the chemistry and personality that Goyo shows onscreen is real.  He and Hugh Jackman spent the first three weeks of filming just getting to know one another so that the chemistry would feel real.

Goyo’s real life parents keep him grounded by not coddling him.  They don’t tell him who his friends can or can’t be and they make him work for anything he gets.  He also still lives in his hometown and hasn’t relocated to Hollywood.

The Giveaway!

It’s a Real Steel steal, if you will, and a prize package with a t-shirt in an adult size, a Real Steel bottle opener, stickers and temporary tattoos.

To enter the Real Steel swag bag giveaway, just leave a comment on the blog below or on the facebook page.  We’ll randomly choose a winner on October 20, 5:00 EST.